Robert Lee Durham

Born in Shelby, North Carolina, on May 4, 1870, Robert Lee Durham was an American engineer, teacher, and author. He studied at Trinity College, later earned a law degree, and over the course of his life worked in several fields before becoming a prominent educator.

Durham is closely associated with Southern Seminary in Buena Vista, Virginia, where he served as the founding principal and later president from 1919 until his retirement in 1942. Archival records and reference biographies also note his wide-ranging career, which included law, military service during the Spanish-American War, engineering work, and writing.

As an author, he is best remembered for The Call of the South (1908), a historical novel now in the public domain. His work reflects the concerns and attitudes of its era, which can make it an interesting read both as fiction and as a window into the early twentieth-century American South.